LinkedIn's website is getting a fresh new design — here's your first look

A little taste of the redesigned LinkedIn.
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If you log on to LinkedIn's website today, you might notice that things are a little ... different.

The Microsoft-owned company is calling it the "largest LinkedIn.com redesign since the company's inception." It takes a lot of the look and feel of the LinkedIn apps for iPhone and Android and brings it back to the website.

Here's your first look at the new LinkedIn website — and a bit about why the company thinks it'll get you to be more "confident" when you go out looking for jobs and new networking opportunities.

(And if you don't have it right away, don't worry, LinkedIn says the new look is going out in waves, with most people getting it on Thursday morning.)

Before we dive in, take one last look at the old LinkedIn homepage. LinkedIn Senior Director of User Experience Design Amy Parnell says her team kept getting one piece of feedback: Users were overwhelmed by the interface. "They weren't sure what to do."

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People would create a profile (like this old-style profile page here), fill it up ... and then never use it again, because it wasn't clear what LinkedIn was "for."

The old LinkedIn profile page.
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Enter the new LinkedIn homepage. It's designed to be simple and clean, so you can get to the most common things you might be trying to do, quickly. The bar across the top that shows you actions you can take is more prominent than in the old design.

Plus, it'll show you fewer notifications — just anything that's new since the last time you checked. So you won't have 100+ notifications waiting for you if you're waiting to approve a lot of people's LinkedIn requests.
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Messaging on LinkedIn gets a big upgrade, too, to look and feel a lot more like Facebook Messenger. Now, if you're clicking around the site, you can keep a conversation going in the lower-right corner. "You can be on task,” Parnell says, and “also be in a conversation with anyone.”

In a neat (or potentially annoying) addition, the "Messages" box will automatically suggest chatting with your connections at whatever company you're looking at on LinkedIn. It's a subtle way of nudging you to reach out.
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Profiles have gotten a facelift, too. In addition to the new design, LinkedIn is introducing new ways to gently suggest how to improve your profile, calling out factors, like adding a killer headshot, that make you look more attractive to recruiters. It's more subtle and less patronizing than the old-style bars that told you how complete your profile was on a 100-point scale.

On that note, LinkedIn is apparently testing a tool that will auto-generate the profile summary section for some users on mobile phones, based on the content of their profile, as a prompt to get people started.
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Similarly, when you're looking at other people's profiles ...

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... or just searching for people, LinkedIn will highlight the actions you can take, and eliminate as much extraneous information as possible.

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The redesign largely takes its cues from the LinkedIn mobile app, which has had a similar design for a long while. With this release, LinkedIn's app and website share a common set of code at the core, meaning an improvement to one is an improvement to both: "Each platform makes the other sort of better," says LinkedIn Senior Director Chris Pruett.

LinkedIn says 60% of its traffic comes from mobile devices at this point.
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In other words, it's the same LinkedIn, just cleaned up and simplified.